Obituary

Ditka Time

Mike Ditka. October 18, 1939 to October 9, 2026.

By Jason C. Wandel for Chicago Register · Saturday, October 10, 2026

If you grew up in Chicago in the ’70s or ’80s, the @ChicagoBears had two things going for them. Walter Payton. And Walter Payton.

Then Mike Ditka took over.

He was already a legend in this town. He was our guy. Blue collar grit. Hard nosed. Tough. Never quit. All heart. Played hurt. Played injured. Asked no quarter and gave none. He played tight end like a linebacker and ran through you, not around you.

What I remember most is feeling like we had one of our own in charge.

Where I grew up, you had a dad, a brother or an uncle in the mills. Ditka came up in steel country. Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, where J&L Steel employed half the town. His father was an ex-Marine who worked the railroad that fed the mill and ran the union local for more than thirty years. What you saw was what you got. Ditka never pulled punches for the press and never sugarcoated a thing. He demanded the best of you.

He was born Michael Dyczko. Ukrainian and Polish on his dad’s side. Irish and German on his mom’s. Polish, Irish, German. Same three parts as me.

That was normal where I grew up. We were hunkies. Treated as less than. We did the work nobody else wanted or was tough enough to do. We did what it took. And men changed their names. My grandfather did it. He picked Wandel. It literally means change.

Look up why the Dyczkos became the Ditkas and you’ll get four answers. It was hard to pronounce. People kept saying Disco. His dad spelled it the way it sounded. It sounded more American. Not one of them says prejudice.

Hard to pronounce. If that was the reason, I’d have changed mine to Juan-Dell.

I can’t prove why his family did it. I don’t need to. I watched it happen to too many families to believe anything else.

Ditka said it in his own book.

“It was a very ethnic area, which was also very prejudiced. Whether you were a Polack or a Hunky or a Jew or a Dago or a Wop or a Cake-eater or Colored, it was prejudiced.”

In my neighborhood we called each other what we were. Polack. Hunky. Whatever you were. It was a bond. We came from every walk of life. Same jersey, same halls. Nobody cared where you came from or what church you went to. Could you play? Did you want to play? You were in. We were friends. Brothers. We loved each other.

The rib was the badge. If the guys gave you a name, you belonged. The worst spot on any team, any block, any bar stool, was the guy nobody bothered to call anything. Nobody talked to him. Outside looking in.

Nobody ever writes about that guy. Most of the time he’s the one writing the story.

In January 1986, the week before the NFC Championship against the Rams, Ditka told the whole country where he stood.

“There are teams that are fair-haired, and those that aren’t so fair-haired. Some teams are named Smith, some Grabowski. We’re Grabowskis.”

The Bears won 24 to 0.

Ditka called us Grabowskis. Hard workers. Take the hits, keep moving, never quit. Grit outlasts finesse.

Around New Year’s 2012, Ditka went on @ESPN SportsCenter and said Colts quarterback Dan Orlovsky @danorlovsky7 had a good Polack name. He had to apologize for it. It wasn’t fair then. It isn’t fair now.

Ditka was the first tight end ever to go over 1,000 yards receiving as a rookie. He went into the @ProFootballHOF in 1988. He and Tom Flores are the only two men to win a Super Bowl as a player, an assistant coach and a head coach. He’s the only man who was there for both of the Bears’ last two championships, playing in ’63 and coaching in ’85. Super Bowl XX is still the only one this city has.

None of that is what I’ll miss.

We had a saying in my house. We run on DITKA TIME. Fifteen minutes early, you’re on time. Five minutes early, you’re late. On time, you’re gonna catch some heat. That clock never stopped for me. Punctuality and attention to detail, I don’t let either one slide to this day.

Mike Ditka showed me, showed Chicago, what was possible. What a winner felt like. And our dads loved him. That was the one thing they could all agree on.

I still remember the posters in the garages. The pictures hanging behind the bar in the dens we now call man caves. My dad had the one of Ditka walking across the field flipping the bird at the camera. A classic now.

And the gum. It felt like Ditka chewed gum for a living. He chewed it with the same fury he played and coached with.

In the mid ’80s the Bears were larger than life.

Mike Ditka was always larger than life.

The city feels it today. I feel it today, after sitting with it for the better part of a day. A part of me feels gone forever. One of the last real connections to family and friends from a time when what you saw was what you got.

Be yourself. Be your best. No excuses. No exceptions.

I still have a copy of Ditka on my bookshelf. It sits right next to McMahon. I got them both the same Christmas as a kid. If you’re a Bears fan, or just a sports fan, read them back to back sometime if you want a good smile.

In Hoc, Mike.

Sources

Photo by Jason C. Wandel. Mike Ditka jersey. My office, October 10, 2026.